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February 24th, 2009 by
Robert

I came across this great guest post on Shoemoney.com by Brian Norgard. It is titled “5 Ways To Find & Acquire Customers On Twitter”.

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this myself. I took his advice and did a quick search relevant to my latest project and came up with a few leads.

While not every business idea or product can benefit from these ideas, it is certainly worth a shot. Not only is it fairly immediate, but also direct to the customer communication. Hard to accomplish that in any other medium.

February 24th, 2009 by
Robert

Except it isn’t just backup, it is archiving. What does that mean? Well, backup solutions are good for disaster recovery. Your hard drive fails. Your kid spills soda all over your laptop, etc. While there is nothing wrong with these solutions, they leave a gap.

And that gap is searching. An archive should be much like a library in that you should be able to search through it looking for things that you want. If have ever worked for a company that had a lot of paper documents and stored them offsite for whatever reason (legal usually), then you are aware of what I mean by archiving. This product will provide that for the digital domain, and to top it off, it will allow you to search through your archive via tags and descriptions.

While it will largely be targeted at small businesses, it can benefit the individual as well. Store tax returns, image originals (Flickr, et. al. will shrink them), movies, or any other kind of file you want to keep for long periods of time. In addition, you won’t have to keep the file on your local computer either, unlike some backup solutions.

January 4th, 2009 by
Robert

One of my recent projects has been Twitopolis.com. I actually started this site some time ago but then shelved it for other stuff.

Well, I dusted it off, put a UI on it and got it up and running. As you can probably guess from the name it is a Twitter based site. With a community theme, it uses tags, via the hashtag, to organize public tweets into various categories.

You can even respond to a tweet directly from the site. If the site gets some traction I think I will add the ability for a user to customize the site, so that it only show the categories they are interested in.

August 4th, 2008 by
Robert

Yes it has been a while since I posted about TUNS, but it is not dead I’ve recently updated it with the new eBay category numbers and it also now works on subdomains. You can see an example of this at Scrapbooking.NicheStoreMall.com.

June 24th, 2008 by
Robert

Famous for its niche and constantly going down, Twitter still continues to be big news. Today Techcrunch has a post about Twitter and how it might become as ubiquitous as email, instant messaging, etc.

I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but they could be right. Which of course leads to the next question then, where are the big competitors? Certainly venture capitalists think there is money to be had there even though Twitter doesn’t monetize their site yet, so there has got to be room for a competitor to nudge in and take some of that market. I think this will become more of a reality if Twitter continues to have their scalability issues, but that is a side issue.

So the question again is, can Twitter be overtaken? I think yes. What do you think?

June 5th, 2008 by
Robert

TechCrunch has launched a new site called Elevator Pitches. The idea is as simple as it is neat, you submit a 60 second video giving your ‘elevator pitch’ for your startup. They then put the videos up on you tube and via their site allow users to rate the pitch and comment on them. The highest rated pitches will then get a mention on TechCrunch itself.

The benefit is twofold here. First you get a chance to see what a lot of people think of your startup as well as your pitching technique. The critiquing itself can be a huge benefit, as long you don’t take it too personal of course, allowing you to improve your delivery.

The second is of the exposure and if you get on the main site even more exposure.

Currently they only take pitches from existing startups but will eventually open it up to those who are still at the concept stage.

April 21st, 2008 by
Robert

I forgot to post about my first check, which was a whopping $87. However today I got my second check and this one is a bit nicer at $206.63. If I could only double my earnings month over month I’ll be rich in no time!

The majority of this check came from one of my eBay sites created off of my niche store builder software. I’m in the process of finishing up converting my old BANS sites to my new software and upgrading my other sites as well to use the new eBay Partner Network setup. Then it will be to find a bunch of new niches and working on prettying up the exiting ones to hopefully get some more sales.

April 18th, 2008 by
Robert

With eBay moving to their own inhouse affiliate program, I was almost dreading the changes to TUNS for it. However, like the good developer that I am :), most of the config stuff was external to the code and making the change over was pretty easy. I just took to long to get around to it honestly. The hard part however will be converting over my existing stores, but I have some free time this weekend so maybe I can knock those out without too much trouble.

April 1st, 2008 by
Robert

As promised by eBay, they are moving away from using Commission Junction for their affiliate program and going internal. Well last night a little before midnight I got an email for them to join their new network.

Their interface is a nice departure from CJ. Nice and clean, as seen by the screen shot below.

The real chore now is to make sure my niche store software is converted over and wait for the BANS guys to do the same for their stuff. Of course I could just convert the rest of my BANS sites over to my stuff

I don’t think converting my software will be too difficult and actually shouldn’t have to change any URLs, as long as the eBay API is migrated over as well, but testing will tell. Guess that work starts tonight!